The Storm Did Call Me to Its Side
by Nagia
Summary: Ilana and Razer, from first to last. Or, farm-girl meets engineer.
1. Chapter 1

On the third day after the irrigation system breaks down, the house's internal temperature controls — those that remain — flicker, then short out, then stay off. It isn't so bad until mid-morning, when the waxing sunlight seems to pool in every nook and cranny.

By noon, Ilana thinks she could probably bake bread outside on one of the hot desert rocks.

By mid-afternoon, she's almost convinced she's melting. How did her ancestors work in this kind of heat? If it were proper, if she weren't potentially surrounded by _ger maharim_, she would rip the veils from her face and hair. But it isn't proper, and the farmhold hosts far too many men who have no right to see all of her.

So instead she works. And underneath the veils, she sweats.

* * *

The engineer arrives before sun-up. She sees a beaten-looking speeder by the cistern, leaned up against the only spot that has a chance of staying shady all day.

* * *

Her father is kind enough to send the engineer to the kitchen first.

His markings — clan and creed; he's an oldest or only son — are harsh, unforgiving. But his eyes and voice are soft. His lips curve gently upward when he takes the second canteen from the counter.

Ilana smiles under her veil. Before he can turn to the door, she asks, "Did you bring a lunch?"

"I…? Yes. Yes, of course. Shouldn't I have?" He looks faintly confused, like her asking has thrown him off balance, and maybe what he thought was good manners and professional behavior is an insult.

Telling him it is when she just wants to get to know him seems cruel. Like kicking a baby chicken-cow.

She feels her heartbeat pick up as she searches for a way. Words have never come so slowly to her before. Why can't she — aha!

"City food," she says, careful to sound just a touch dismissive. Never mind that her father's farm helps supply the city. "When we eat, I'll bring you something good."

That makes his eyes widen. He looks around the room, but there's no help to be found. Her cousins are all pretending disinterest. So, with an awkward, stammered, "If you think it's proper," he half-flees to the door.

Before he goes, though, he turns and smiles at her. The expression lightens his face, makes his cheekbones beautiful instead of merely sharp, softens his markings. The warmth that touches his eyes in the wake of the smile is more beautiful even than his face.

"Thank you," he says.

* * *

Ilana finds him scowling and elbow-deep in the mechanical workings of the irrigation system. Three or four diagnostic scanners hang from his belt. The long angles of his markings, the dark smudges around his eyes, the sharpness of his face all combine to make him look ferocious.

She almost doesn't approach, but her brother takes his lunch from the basket and collapses in the shade of one of the water-bearers.

"Are you going to make me beg? You are, aren't you. Fine. I'll beg. Please,_please_ reset pump drive nineteen."

Perhaps it's a scowl of concentration?

So Ilana asks: "Should I come back later?"

His head jerks up. He smiles at her, the quick, fleeting smile of someone who's spotted a friend, then looks down at the panel. He withdraws his hands — which drip grease, thick and gray-black — and smiles again.

"No, no. I'm sorry if I… anyway, no, it's fine. All I can do now is wait." The smile turns a little rueful, a little confiding. "I just feel better if I have my hands on the gears."

It does make a sort of sense. She looks at the hands in question. Even covered in grease and sloggy water, they're slim, nimble-looking.

Ilana nods and holds out a basket. "I have more water for your canteens. And a wash rag, if you want to —"

He takes the rag gratefully. He mops his hands with the rag, then rolls one sleeve back down his arm to swipe at his forehead.

"I'm Ilana," she says.

"Razer."

* * *

They eat together. He makes her laugh, and smiles when he does.

* * *

"So what's wrong with the water-bearers?"

"Pump nineteen is overactive, wasting water, which sets off the system auto-shutdown," Razer says. "But it looks like a virus is affecting the entire operating system and spread to the house. I've re-coded what I could and done a hard reboot."

"A virus?"

"People have been programming and reprogramming this OS for years, and nobody's commented any of their changes or bugfixes. Complete tangled mess of code. But I'm pretty sure the if/then conditional in line thirty-three nineteen wasn't written to loop, and that the water-level-check executable wasn't written in without a referrent."

He doesn't pause to explain anything. Ilana might be annoyed at the near-gibberish, but it's… nice. Not to be talked down to.

"Who would want to infect a farm with a virus?"

Razer looks at her. His lips turn down. The three lines on his chin make him look even sadder.

They both watch a plane fly overhead. Ilana doesn't bother trying to identify it by markings or colors. The warlords do have a half-coherent system of figuring out who is who, but they steal each other's planes as often as they steal each other's territories.

* * *

When Razer leaves, her father catches her eye, then turns to him and says that he should come back in a couple of weeks. Just to make sure the OS is safe.

* * *

When Razer comes back, he has a bolt of fabric for her. It's a pretty enough blue, but someone embroidered the borders with a delicate white and gold bird-and-sun pattern. She thanks him graciously.

Later, she and her mother measure it. It's just long enough, so she folds a corner, and sews a hem.

The next time he visits — two weeks later, this time to check their systems and stay for dinner — she wears it to cover her hair.

* * *

Two weeks later, and Razer doesn't pretend he's there to check on the irrigation system. He does check it before he goes. But he spends most of his time with her.

"Ilana, the problem is the warlords," he says and points to one of the low-flying planes that are always cris-crossing the sky.

"The problem," she retorts, "is nobody has anything. We all look to a warlord to solve our problems."

"So teach people otherwise," Razer says. "What does that _change_? Tell a warlord to get off your land, and what does he do?"

But he's wrong, she can see that he's wrong. And she tells him so: "Armies can't solve this. Everytime one army loses, the victor rolls in. It's endless. We have to try a different angle."

"We need a militia. Something to _make_ them stay away."

"If we choose that path, how close will we come to destroying ourselves? The war won't be able to end until all the warlords are dead and their armies broken. The system is what's broken, not just the warlords."

"And you think the warlords will let us fix the system? It's not in their interests. They'll destroy any city that tries, and steal whatever they don't burn."

* * *

It's a disagreement she can live with, and he is not unkind about it. He is by nature a builder, a fixer, not a destroyer.

* * *

Notes:

Title from Mirah's, "The Dogs Of B.A."

Certain words are altered Arabic.


	2. Chapter 2

Outside, her brothers and the new farmhand are harvesting the spice shrubs, while her father checks the chicken-cows, to see which is ready for slaughter. Razer and her very oldest brother have retreated to Father's study to reprogram the irrigation system (and comment all the changes. Apparently un-commented moderations to any code are a pet peeve of Razer's).

The women of the household, however, have gathered in the house's remotest room to spin yarn or thread. Two of her cousins have some sort of weaving project on a large loom, though they've been secretive about just what they're going to use it for when it's done. Her aunts sit in a corner repairing clothes, while Mother embroiders the collar, sleeves, and hem of a jilbab.

Ilana stares down at the newest bolt of fabric (another gift from Razer) and realizes she's not going to have enough for both a khimar and a niqaab. She's already cut it, leaving it circular, and begun to hem it. A shame, since the black fabric feels so soft. It'd be nice against the lower half of her face.

She has just finished the hem when they all hear the low, hissing whine of a breaking down harvester.

Her father shouts, "Micah! Micah, get away-!"

The whine stops for three seconds. Instead they hear a cry, the anguished, startled moan of a man who just watched a solar-powered engine drive a threshing blade into his skin and drag it out again. He hasn't begun to feel it yet.

Ilana doesn't doubt that he will.

She rushes to the kitchen - the only room in the house equipped to deal with so much blood, the first place any farm hand goes when something inevitably goes wrong - and doesn't even stop to think about putting on her khimar.

She pulls aside the tapestry dividing the kitchen from the rest. It nearly comes loose in her fingers, but she's through the doorway. She can feel her heart speeding up, wild, out of control, just like her fingers. She sees her father first, the blood on his hands and soaking his collar; sees her brother, Ephram, whose face has gone pale. Razer and Reuben careen into the room. Reuben looks panicked; Razer looks eerily calm.

Micah. The new hand. His _thaub_ has two gaping holes in it. A gash in his arm bleeds freely, while blood wells up from another cut to his chest. His breathing is heavy, labored, and his eyes have widened. His face looks very pale.

Ilana clasps her hands together for just a second, spares the time to take two deep, calming breaths. She can't do a thing if her hands are shaking.

"Micah," she says, "it's all going to be alright."

(Who's she reassuring, really?)

* * *

Her father shreds Micah's shirt so she can get to the injuries quickly. He doesn't bother going for a knife; he just strips his gloves and uses the sharp points of his nails.

Antiseptic first; Micah gurgles low in his throat in an effort not to scream. Ilana applies it to his chest. Razer and Ephram have to hold the farmhand down so she can dribble it over the cut on his arm.

Then topical anesthetic. Micah goes limp after that. Reuben, her oldest and tallest brother, supports his weight.

She threads the needle. Unasked, Razer dips his hands in the antiseptic. She pushes Micah's shirt away; Razer pushes the jagged edges of Micah's skin together for her. She sews the cuts closed.

The black medical thread creates the illusion of new markings on Micah's gray skin.

* * *

Two weeks pass, and Ilana drifts between anxiety and relief. Every day she doesn't see Razer seems to itch, almost, but every day closer to the next time he'll visit lets her breathe a little deeper.

The day he usually visits arrives. He does not.

She spends the day almost listless, grinding rice flour and sorting spices with an ear on the kitchen door and an eye on the window. Her cousins all nudge each other and whisper amongst themselves. She ignores them.

By noon, Ilana has resigned herself to the fact that he is not coming and is half worried something has happened to him, half afraid that being in a public space without her khimar has ruined everything. But she can't regret it: if the price of her modesty, her privacy, is someone else's life, it's too high.

Toward the end of the day, Ilana pauses in her counting of shoumar seeds. She has to still her hands at the realization. If Razer is willing to pay that price, he is not the man she thought he was.

Mother sweeps into the kitchen just as Ilana begins loosening the khimar she made of Razer's second gift.

Mother looks at her for a moment. She stares into Ilana's eyes, seemingly searching for something, before cupping the palms of her hands against Ilana's face.

"Oh, child," her mother says. "I told your father it was a fool idea. Next week we'll go to the city and see him."

* * *

Mother knocks on her door. Ilana rises, pulls her best abaya on over a deep gold caftan and chooses a white _niqaab_ instead of her usual practical black. Last of all, she wraps her hair away in the fabric Razer gave her. His first gift.

Her mother even coaxes Father into a more fashionable white _thaub_ instead of his dusty, practical gray-brown one.

She tries to tell herself this visit is nothing to be so excited about. And yet she can't seem to tear herself away from the cart's windows

She knows the city's skyline: flat roofs, square windows. The buildings are blocky, and no few of them have low doors or ceilings that go much higher than the windows.

As they pass through the market square, she sees a host of bazaars. Merchants behind stands or beneath awnings shout at the passerby, competing for attention with men who store their wares on carpets and sit beside them. Everywhere she turns, she sees tapestries, glinting jewelry, women in silks much finer than anything she owns.

And then she sees Razer. He's wearing his usual engineer jumpsuit, but for once there's no grease on him. She registers a man and woman standing behind him, but he looks up.

Over the nose-bridge of her niqaab, their eyes meet.

Razer smiles again.

* * *

After this, the negotiations begin. Her parents meet with Razer's employers - the closest people he has to parents of his own, or so he says and they're all content to believe him - and talk about whether Razer and Ilana are suited for each other. Ilana's cousins serve coffee and tiger-lamb skewers; neither Ilana nor Razer is permitted near these proceedings.

Then the age-old financial battle ensues: does he owe a bride-price for carrying away their daughter to the city, or do her parents owe his employers a dowry for luring their best engineer away to a farm?

* * *

"We could stay here," Razer says. He cuts a _karmuush_ open with an ungloved hand and offers her half.

It's a polite gesture, automatic. Ilana waves the half of the fruit away, since she'd have to take off her _niqaab_ to eat it. (Reuben reaches between them and takes it, happily sucking on the dark brown fruit and spitting out golden seeds.)

"You don't really want to stay with the farm. You just think I do."

Razer kicks a rock out of their way, then looks up at the horizon. "I could be happy here."

"Razer, you'd be happiest in the city."

Instead of denying it, he pulls his gloves back on and says, "I want us both to be happy." He hands his half of the fruit to Reuben and says, voice dry, "I like your family."

"We both want more in our lives than this farm."

His smile looks crooked, confiding, but she recognizes the warmth in his eyes.

* * *

Ilana is a fixer, too.


End file.
